Women at the Forefront of Payments - Interview with Jess Houlgrave

Wana, thank you very much for having me. It's really nice to join you today.

So, I'm currently the CEO at Wallet Connect and Wallet Connect is a network that is core infrastructure in the crypto and Web3 space today. We connect about 700 different wallets. That might be a retail wallet or it might be a custodial wallet that's used by institutions. And then about 80,000 different applications, and an application can be a game, a payments company, a trading protocol or anything else. And we provide this network and connectivity messaging layer that allows these parties to communicate with each other. I joined the company about two and a half years ago and prior to that I had a mixed background. Most recently I was at Checkout.com, the global acquirer, and before that had a number of roles across different crypto and payments companies, and started my life in much more traditional finance as an investment banker and in private equity. So I've wound my way here through a number of different channels and I'm super lucky to be leading this company now.

Great question. I think what drew me there was a couple of things. Number one, it's complex and I love complex problems. When you start peeling away the layers of what a payment is, it involves all sorts of different things from the actual technical layers through the regulatory and compliance layers through the user experience. And so this complexity is a challenge that really interests me. And when you start layering in crypto to that, you get a whole load more complexity to deal with as well. I think the second thing is that payments is obviously crucial to the whole operation of the globe. We each and every one of us is making payments every single day, receiving payments, it's how our businesses are running. And so making sure that is smooth and efficient, I think is one way that we can really help unlock global potential. Especially in places in the world where payment is really problematic and where merchants pay a huge amount for just a standard transaction. I think there's a lot more that we can build there.